Thursday, July 05, 2012

Travis Walton and Me

While at this most recent Roswell Festival (2012),
I had a chance to sit down with Travis Walton. I knew that he had been more
than a little annoyed with The Abduction
Enigma and our reporting on the Walton abduction case. In fact, last year,
he wouldn’t even speak to me, not that I really attempted to engage him in
conversation. Had I done so then, he might well have talked to me.

This year, however, he was with Steve Pierce who
had been one of those on the wood cutting crew and who had witnessed the abduction.
Steve had become the center of a small controversy about the case in recent
months, and I thought this would be a good time to talk with him about that. In
fact, I engaged him in conversation the first opportunity that I had.

﻿

Travis Walton at the 2011 Roswell Festival.

I worried, however, that Travis might have seen
this and think I was digging for dirt on the abduction. I was more interested
in what Steve had to say about Philip Klass and Klass’ attempt to induce Steve
to say it was a hoax. With that in mind, I walked over to Travis’ table and sat
down in the vacant seat.

I opened the conversation by asking, “Are you
still mad at me?”

Travis explained that he thought I (and by I, I
mean Russ Estes, Bill Cone and me) had relied too heavily on Klass’ arguments
about the case. Travis, I think, didn’t believe we had given him a fair shake.

﻿﻿

Russ Estes in Roswell in 1997.

That might well be, and of course, we were writing
about the alternative explanations for alien abduction, meaning we were writing
from the point of view that alien abduction had terrestrial explanations. We
used many of the sources available, but Travis didn’t think we had used his
book and explanations enough in our reporting.

I did tell him early on in our conversation that
my interest in talking to Steve was to get his side of the Klass story and I
wasn’t looking for new information on the abduction. That said, we talked a
little more about the case.

Yes, it does seem that the first, failed lie
detector test might have been more about the operator’s observations of Travis’
reactions to the questions and not anything the machine showed. It might be
that the first operator was injecting his own personal bias into his
interpretation of the results. I do know that often the lie detector is used as
a way to encourage the guilty to confess.

So, the results of that first test might have been
skewed by Travis’ reactions to the events of that week and by the operator’s
belief that there is no alien abduction. To him anything to suggest otherwise
must be a lie. In other words, he based his opinion, not on the results of the
machine but on his opinions about UFOs.

And there was the second, passed lie detector test
which I mention here in the interest of fairness. And a third test, some twenty
or so years later that was also passed.

Anyway, the riff that I had created in the late 20th
century had been repaired now, early in the 21st. We shook hands and
Travis understood that I was not seeking information about the abduction but
about Klass’ communication with Steve Pierce.

We did talk about the efficacy of the polygraph
and I suggested that I knew a way to test if a lie told over a long period
became so ingrained that the machine would not detect it. He said that such
experiments had been done by giving lie detector tests to prisoners in an
attempt to gauge the way a lie might become, for the teller, the same as the
truth.

I was surprised that Travis could discuss such a
thing at such a high level, which is not to say that I was surprised by his
intelligence. I was surprised that he had been reading, or had access to,
psychological journals. These are usually quite expensive and often not “light”
reading, not to mention easily available.

And, I’m not sure the validity of those tests. I
think a better experiment would be to use Vietnam “wannabes.” These are guys
who tell horrific tales of Vietnam combat to families, friends and to support
groups. They clog the VA system taking up spaces for real veterans who have
real needs.

But there are records that can be checked and by
accessing those records we can compare their tales with the facts. In some
cases those men were clerks or cooks and while they did serve in Vietnam, they
did not have a combat role. Some of these wannabes had served in the Army but
not in Vietnam. And in more than a few extreme cases, they didn’t even serve in
the military.

The point is that they have been telling the
stories for decades and might have become so comfortable with their tales of
combat that their lies won’t register… Or maybe, sitting hooked up to the
machine, their body would betray them, revealing their lies. I think this might
be a more accurate way to test the theory and is something that hasn’t been
done, as far as I know.

Kathleen Marden

So, as I say, Travis and I shook hands. If there
had been a “feud” it was now over. Later, and by later I mean Sunday evening, I
was having dinner at the Cattle Baron (which I mention only because a. I get to
plug the Cattle Baron and b. I can mention that I was sitting at a table with
Stan Friedman, Kathleen Marden and Stan’s son) when Travis walked up to the
table to say, “Hello,” to me. We shook hands again, proving what a class act
Travis is.

I asked if he remembered when we met in Germany
and he said he did. We didn’t see much of each other because of the schedules,
but he did remember. Just a little aside to suggest that we had met a long time
ago.

If you ask me today what I think about the Walton
abduction, I will tell you that if alien abduction is real, I would expect it
to be more like that experienced by Travis, or Betty and Barney Hill. A
one-time thing that is more of a target of opportunity than these decades long
experiences told by so many others. I would tell you that I believe that alien
abduction has a terrestrial explanation, or rather terrestrial explanations but
that is just my opinion. I would concede that the Walton experience is quite
strange.

But I would note here that most hoaxes are
confessed eventually. In the Walton case, you have a number of young men, who
are now much older, and yet they have not broken ranks. The Santilli film is an
admitted hoax. I can’t tell you the number of UFO photographs that have been
admitted to be hoaxes, including those that have fooled some very smart people.
Or the number of hoaxes created by skeptics to prove that we are credulous. With
this case, there have been no defections from the ranks (and we’ll explore my
discussions with Steve Pierce about that later).

I don’t plan to engage in a long debate about the
details of the Walton abduction. I do have an autographed version of the
updated book that Travis gave me a decade and a half ago, which might explain
why he thought we should have used more of his information.

I am glad that Travis, who was once more than a
little annoyed with me, and I have reached a new understanding. I really don’t
like to offend people (though I seem to do it quite easily and much more often
than I care to admit) and I have taken the sting out of some of my words
written quite a while ago. I guess it just shows that sometimes you have to
talk to one another in person so that everyone is on the same page.

I understand that your point was minor. I wasn't so much "debating" the point as trying to be helpful. Believe me, I know about the (sometimes astronomical) fees attached to accessing relevant research materials today; that's why I qualified my statement by writing "some." It's a sad fact that so much useful and vital information isn't free.